Month: October 2011

Original Author: Lee Winder Scrum Prohibits all Specializations’. The part that stuck me was the following: I understand that Scrum has been applied mainly to software products and that the elimination of “specialties” means that the database programmer, UI programmer and QA engineer should all be able to perform each other’s roles equally. This is … Continue reading “Agile – Specialisations Still Matter”

Original Author: Chad Moore Last week I attended an “Acting for Animators” training session from Ed Hooks. Mr. Hooks has been offering this class since around the time PDI was developing the film “Antz”. Ed is an actor by profession and was brought in to PDI to teach their animators acting principles. He’s written two … Continue reading “A question in regards to storytelling”

Original Author: Sam Martin In my previous post, I wrote about why there is Black & White 2. My headline summary would be that computational geometry is both a powerful and complicated tool, and you should therefore seriously consider it but approach with some caution. Identifying the problems that are safe to tackle and those … Continue reading “Trouble with Triangles”

Original Author: Stefan Reinalter Technology/ Code / One scenario that is quite common in all game engines is having to look-up some resource (texture, shader parameter, material, script, etc.) based on a string, with e.g. code like the following: Texture* tex = textureLibrary->FindTexture(“my_texture”); ShaderParameter param = shader->FindParameter(“matrixWVP”); For today, we are not so much concerned … Continue reading “Quasi compile-time string hashing”

Original Author: Andrew Hague A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were talking about common clichés in games and we started listing all those funny little things that seem to make their way into lots of the video games we play. Use any search engine to find them. However, he thought there … Continue reading “Game design, B-minus, should try harder.”

Original Author: Betable Blog In our last post, the slot machine. See if this sounds familiar to you: To play the game, you put currency into the machine. You then pull the knob and wait for the result. When the result is presented, you are rewarded with a cacophony of exciting sounds, attention-grabbing images, … Continue reading “Exposing Social Gaming’s Hidden Lever”

Original Author: Heather M Decker-Davis I recently endured a horribly stressful deadline and near the final hour, I found myself face to face with a crippling phantom of sorts. It’s something that’s neatly tucked away within us all, waiting quietly for a moment of weakness: self doubt. This troublesome specter is most likely to rear … Continue reading “The Specter of Doubt”

Original Author: Erwin Coumans Today’s Chrome web browser update means you can develop, sell, download and play 3D games written in C++ right from the Chrome Web Store, without plug-in. This is a quick walk-through on how to develop a basic 3D Native Client app. You can try out my test app from the Chrome … Continue reading “Native Client for Dummies”

Original Author: John-McKenna Mathematics for Game Developers John-McKenna 9:21 pm on October 26, 2011 Counting comments… Part 0: Fundamentals Last time I made the great mistake of leaping straight in at numbers, forgetting some of the important background. So today, instead of the integers I promised, I’m going to cover sets. Sets are ubiquitous in … Continue reading “Mathematics for Game Developers”

Original Author: Kyle-Kulyk Like that title? I came up with it myself. It was either that or something about a tangled web. I think I made the right decision. My last blog entry on #AltDevBlogADay was concerning my road to becoming a game developer (although, according to my wife, I shouldn’t be calling myself that … Continue reading “Along came a spider…”